Rick Scott needs a better product to sell

TALLAHASSEE – You have to hand it to Gov. Rick Scott: he's single-minded when it comes to selling the state of Florida and trying to promote economic growth.

This week, he went to Madrid and dined with bankers, CEOs and titans of trade (and raised eyebrows when he asked Spanish King Juan Carlos about a controversial elephant-hunting trip.) In his first sixteen months on the job, he's gone to Chicago, New York, Canada, and Brazil on "trade missions."

GrayRobinson lobbyist Fred Leonhardt, who went on the Spanish trade mission, described Florida's salesman-in-chief as "tireless" on the trip. "He is being well received by these business leaders because they view him as 'one of them'" Leonhardt said.

Unfortunately, it usually takes more than a salesman to close a deal.

There needs to be a market for the product you are selling. Ask the real-estate hucksters and politicians who have been selling Florida for a long time.

The United States is saturated right now with places where companies can find cheap, unskilled labor without Florida's regulatory rigmarole necessitated by our dwindling water supplies, imperiled species, polluted estuaries, rivers and springs, and shrinking Everglades.

The governor appears to be on a crash course to use the second half of his first term to slice away at those regulations – his office has targeted 1,100 for repeal – but his ambitions for improving the quality of the labor pool are more limited.

"We have so much to brag about. We need to learn how to brag," Scott told the Enterprise Florida's board of directors earlier this month. "What I want to brag about in the near future is that we are the number one place – not to visit for Disney -- for families to have jobs."

But chest-thumping, however well-intentioned, doesn't help launch Florida into the "knowledge-based economy" politicians have been touting for the last two decades. You don't cut $1.35 billion from public school classrooms, restore roughly $900 million the next year -- and call it even. Not if you want laid-off, high-skilledHewlett-Packardemployees to move here with their families, or if you expect today's students to develop into high-skilled workers.

Although Florida's unemployment rate dropped from 9 percent to 8.7 percent in April, that was largely because approximately 28,000 workers dropped out of the labor force. The state added a whopping 4,000 jobs during April. At the same time, 17,000 working-age people moved into the state.

The state's economists have said for the last three years that Florida would add workers faster than it would add jobs, and that this would slow our return to pre-recession employment levels.

Scott deserves credit for abandoning the politically untenable position he took his first year – slashing public education because school districts and state government had dared to rely on federal stimulus dollars to stay afloat.

But you can't also slash $300 million from an already hamstrung university system and then sell the CEO of Dell on moving his company here. Researchers are leaving Florida's universities for higher-paying gigs elsewhere.

Incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford and Senate President Don Gaetz plan to make higher-education reform a hallmark of their two-year tenure. They're helping Scott now with a 'task force" aimed at "reforming" higher education in Florida. They may want to start by hiring faculty.

House Speaker Dean Cannon, in his session-opening speech last January, warned legislators about a "race to mediocrity" among Florida's universities. Lawmakers then passed a budget that depleted university reserves and created a 12th state university that nobody yet knows how to finance.